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Preventing “father’s proud”

Sometimes, you can be proud of your work. You did it, it works, and it’s fine.

Then, some (tuly?) idiot comes to you and asks you for some improvements over your work, or points to some points what could be make better. It’s a normal thing, nobody is perfect and our work could not be perfect too.
Being proud of our work is a good thing, makes us to try to work at our best each time we must do something. Being blind because that proud is a very bad thing.

Seeing someone ranting at you because you have showed some weak point of his work is a very sad thing.

When I started to work, after finishing my first program, my project manager looked it and said me: “It’s ok, I like it…just a bit thing. It could be improved. A lot”. The world around me became dark, and for a second I was trying to find a demolishing answer. Then I though about his “small” critic, and he Was right.
Looking for a way to improve that piece of code, I learnt a lot of things, I wrote some nested loops what would be better with parallel processing (oooooh! wow! what a great coder I am who can talk about parallel processing!) and I learnt what that processing way is. Being true, I learnt the name “parallel processing” just few days ago, reading an SDN blog (SAP TM, or copyright, or something like that). But the idea was there, and I knew it before knowing its name. Just because my boss said me “it could be improved”.

Maybe we must NOT accept each piece of criticism over our work. We are professionals, and we do our tasks at our best. BUT we must thing about those critics, and learn from them each thing we can. Maybe we will learn the guy we have in front of us is a jerk. But learning things like that is a useful thing too…